proximoception | (no subject)

HB: Well, we have four living writers in America who have, in one way or another, touched what I would call the sublime. They are McCarthy, of course, with Blood Meridian; Philip Roth, particularly with two extraordinary novels, the very savage Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, which I mentioned before; Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is a little long for what it does but nevertheless is the culmination of what Don can do; and, of course, the mysterious figure of Mr. Pynchon. I don’t know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century, it probably would not be something by Roth or McCarthy; it would probably be Mason & Dixon, if it were a full-scale book, or if it were a short novel it would probably be The Crying Of Lot 49. Pynchon has the same relation to fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is beyond compare.

Startling upset by Mason? Though Bloom does call Blood Meridian the best book since As I Lay Dying elsewhere in the same interview. Might have some time to try M&D again next month.

Threaded | Flat

M&D is easily my favorite. When it came out HB said he loved it. Then about six months later (when I finished it) he said he thought it didn't work and while better than Vineland was a falling off. Then a couple of years later he loved it almost as much as Gravity's Rainbow. Now. more recently, it's beyond compare. I don't know as I'd call it sublime at any point, but I think it's just an amazing book. The comparison with Ashbery seems both dazzling and right to me.

I can't get myself to read a lot of DeLillo. I gave up on Underworld though maybe I should try again.

Edited 2009-07-01 10:57 (UTC)

It's fun that everybody likes different things when it comes to great novels. Bloom doesn't have the same opinion as Bloom for example. I wouldn't put Mason & Dixon in even the same category of achievment as Blood Meridian. I guess I forget what he means by sublime... I think he means comedy mostly. He once compared the Byron the Bulb section of Gravity's Rainbow to Duck Soup as moments of the American Sublime.

Anyway, I think Mason & Dixon is quite flawed. There's way too much exposition (like in Against the Day) that drags in paragraph after paragraph that add nothing thematically or structurally and seem to be TP not wanting to waste research he did. In Gravity's Rainbow, every detail seems to add momentum to the grand design. And, in GR, Pynchon wrangles the languages of the hard and social sciences and the occult to get the words to say what he wants to say. Sort of like Faulkner in that way of wrestling the speech. Or like Blood Meridian which borrowed that wrangling from Faulkner and took it a step beyond. (Vineland I don't like much either).